The room had been changing for months, and almost no one mentioned it. On a Tuesday in May the first booking quietly fell through; by the second Tuesday two more had followed, and a pattern began to form.
What separates a signal from a story is the patience to wait for the third confirmation. We are reporting on the third.
"Nobody in our team flew to Austin this year. We just stopped. And then we noticed three other teams hadn't either."
The implications — for festivals, for A&R, for the discovery economy — are not yet public, but they are no longer secret.